The local Toys"R"Us finally restocked their Prime Deluxes, so I managed to pick up the rest of the wave, Starscream and Arcee. I already had Arcee in pink, so Starscream was the toy in which I was most interested. And people who had him kept on saying he was great, so more reason to be excited.

He is pretty great! Now, I have to qualify this statement in a number of ways. He's a Transformers jet, which means you can expect there to be a lot of robot stuff hanging off the underside of his alternate mode. Half of Starscream's mass in jet form is his legs hangin' off him. And the middle of the fuselage is clearly his robot mode chest, fake eyes and all. (If you look closely, you'll notice thatPrime Starscream's chest is a swipe of Movie Starscream's face.) With these two things in mind, his jet mode is pretty strongly compromised. But it's still a fun little jet mode, and I'll tell you why I don't really mind, all things considered.

The robot mode is where Starscream shines. It's rare that a toy captures the personality of its subject so ... readily. That characteristic slump of Starcream's spine is built into his architecture. It's nearly impossible to get the toy to stand in a way that does not evoke the character's essence. The worst you can do, really, is align the arc of his legs wrong, which results in a pelvic thrust. And, let's face it, that's still pretty Starscreamy. He's kind of a filthy jerk.

There's a larger, Voyager Class-sized Starscream coming out next year which will undoubtedly work out a few of the jet mode's kinks. I'm probably not interested, though. This Starscream is scaled better to my other toys. Who wants a Starscream that's bigger than (the inevitable Voyager Class) Megatron, anyway? Megatron towers over Starscream in the cartoon, and anything else on my toy shelf would just seem wrong.